AWS Backup Pricing Calculator - Estimate Backup Storage Costs

Warm storage keeps backups immediately accessible for restores and costs more (e.g., $0.05/GB for EBS). Cold storage is ~75% cheaper ($0.0125/GB for EBS) but requires minimum 90-day retention and has higher restore costs ($0.03/GB vs $0.02/GB). Cold storage is available for EBS, EFS, DynamoDB, Timestream, VMware, and SAP HANA backups.

Restoring from warm storage costs $0.02/GB in us-east-1. Restoring from cold storage costs $0.03/GB. For example, restoring 100 GB from warm storage costs $2.00, while restoring from cold storage costs $3.00. There are no additional charges for the restore operation itself.

Cross-region backup copies cost approximately $0.04/GB for data transfer plus storage costs in the destination region. For example, copying 500 GB of EBS backups from us-east-1 to eu-west-1 costs $20 for transfer plus $25/month for storage in the destination region. This is in addition to your source region storage costs.

AWS Backup does not have a dedicated free tier. However, some underlying services include backup storage in their free tier. For example, Amazon RDS provides backup storage equal to your provisioned database storage at no additional charge. Check each service's pricing page for specific free tier benefits that may apply to your backups.

Key strategies to reduce AWS Backup costs: Use cold storage for long-term retention (saves ~75% on storage). Implement lifecycle policies to automatically transition backups to cold storage. Optimize retention periods - only keep backups as long as needed. Use incremental backups which only store changed data. For RDS and Aurora, consider using native automated backups which are included at no extra cost up to your provisioned storage.

AWS Backup and native EBS snapshots have similar storage pricing (both ~$0.05/GB-month in us-east-1). The main differences are: AWS Backup offers cold storage at $0.0125/GB-month (not available for native snapshots), centralized management, cross-account and cross-region automation, and policy-based retention. For simple single-account backups, native snapshots may be sufficient. For enterprise backup strategies, AWS Backup provides more features.